


Unlike Minds

by lodessa



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-08
Updated: 2006-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-10 01:53:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mac is the only one with the skills to set something like this up. Lizzie is the only person at Neptune High who subscribes to Grind Girl Magazine. How exactly did the purity test craze start? Set around "Like a Virgin"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unlike Minds

Group projects were the devil. Everyone knew that. Teachers always paired you up with whoever's work habits were least like your own and linked your grades together to provide the most awkward and uncomfortable experience possible. Today was no exception, Mac thought as she trudged across the classroom.

"Ummm… hi." Mac said, walking awkwardly up to Lizzie Manning. Her fraying t-shirt felt glaringly discordant beside Lizzie's $300 top, which could easily have been intended to be lingerie.

"Hi…" Lizzie replied distractedly, absorbed with her image as displayed by her compact mirror.

Mac couldn't really blame her; if she had Barbie doll looks like Lizzie, she'd probably spend all her time glued to the mirror too.

"I want to remind all of you." Ms. Allen's voice rang shrilly through the classroom, "That I expect both partners to contribute equally to the project regardless of your relative skills in computer science. If I even suspect that one of you is doing all the work, you will both fail."

There went all of Lizzie's gladness to be paired with the school's computer genius, Ms. Allen was a veritable Nazi and the girls exchanged despairing glances; they both knew that she really would fail them.

"There goes my smooth plan of offering to do everything in hopes of having you not hate me." Mac bemoaned, half jokingly.

"You're some kind of computer genius right?" Lizzie asked, twisting a lock of white blonde hair around her finger, "You already know all this stuff. Why are you even taking this class?"

"Easy A." Mac replied, "What about you? It's not a required course and no offense but I don't see a lot of programming in your future."

The other girl looked wistfully across the room to where Eddie Johnson, the yearbook editor, was talking with his partner, Carrie Bishop.

"So you're taking this class for a boy…" Mac stated, unable to keep a hint of condescension or bitterness, she wasn't sure which, out of her voice. She caught herself and quickly changed the subject, although Lizzie didn't seem to be at all bothered, "The important question, I guess, is how we are going to convince her royal pain in the assness that I didn't do the whole project." Mac said with a nod in Ms. Allen's direction.

"Maybe if we made it kind of suck…" Lizzie suggested, smoothing a cherry colored gloss, which Mac could smell from a few feet away, onto her lips with her forefinger.

Mac gave her a look of disbelief, which Lizzie ignored as she stuck her finger in her mouth to remove the excess gloss.

"Well what do YOU recommend then?" Lizzie replied, raising her carefully shaped eyebrows, "Since you're so smart and all."

"Well… umm I guess you could pick the topic?" Mac hesitantly volunteered, biting at the corner of her lip slightly.

"And how would that help?" Lizzie demanded one hand on her hip and the other running listlessly through her hair.

"I just thought that if it was… you know something ummm…" Mac stammered.

"Whorish?" Lizzie said coldly, looking Mac straight in the face so she couldn't avoid it.

"I was thinking girly." Mac corrected apologetically, "It's pretty obvious I'm not exactly up on the kinds of clothes and makeup and boy related things you seem to be, so she'd have to know I didn't come up with that stuff."

"So I come up with the actual content and you'll turn it into a shiny website?" the girl who definitely was expanded.

"Yeah. Pretty much that's the idea." Mac confirmed, waiting for a the painted princess to agree or disagree with the plan. She tugged at the ends of her sleeves nervously.

Lizzie's china doll face was blank for a painfully long moment before she finally said, "Okay."

Mac breathed a sigh of relief, "So we should probably meet later on this week so you can give me the stuff to put on the site." She suggested.

Lizzie nodded in agreement, flashing a hint of her professionally whitened smile.

They sat there in silence for moment. Lizzie didn't want to say that she didn't want to meet at the Manning residence because her parents were a hairsbreadth away from being officially psychotic, and Mac wasn't keen on mention that she was embarrassed to have an 09er see her lower middle class home.

"Java the Hutt at 7:30 on Thursday?" Lizzie finally suggested.

"Sure." Mac replied, not saying that since she had no social life any time would be just fine, and wondering if her partner had spent the prolonged silence mentally squeezing in this inconvenience between dates.

The bell rang and it was a flurry of activity trying to get belongings gathered and get out of the door as quickly as possible. Lizzie slid out of her seat and was gone before Mac could even get her notebook inside her book bag, and she left a trail of trendy perfume behind her.

The magazines that Lizzie brought to their meeting on Thursday were a dizzying array of different perfume samples, that made Mac feel a little lightheaded as they flipped through them.

"Don't these things have like quizzes?" Mac asked, at a loss for anything they could take from the magazine's fashion tips without simply plagiarizing uncreatively, "I could program a site to calculate results… maybe have some flashy visuals to go with."

"You mean like: Does he like you quizzes? Or the ever famous, What Color Should You Wear?" Lizzie replied, unimpressed.

"Yeah, something like that. It should be something that people are actually going to be intrigued by. Ms. Allen said the site with the most hits gets an automatic A. I mean I can rig the site to pop up high on Google searches and things, but it's a lot easier to get web traffic for something compelling."

"What about this?" Lizzie asked, flipping towards the back of a particularly noxious-pink volume, and reading in a high pitched and sarcastically overexcited voice, "Pure as the Driven Snow or Devilishly Bad... How Pure Are You? Take Our Scientifically Based Test to Find Out."

Mac pushed a strand of hair, that had once been dyed an electric blue but now was a sort of mossy green color, out of her face as she took the magazine from Lizzie and scanned the page, "This is good." She remarked, eyes focused on her laptop screen, as she began typing, "It should attract guys as well as girls."

She looked up to find Lizzie watching her, "You know there's a lot of things you could do without losing your whole anti-establishment look that would still be way more flattering than your current do." The modern Marilyn commented in a way that might have been insulting or might have been an offer of friendship.

"Huh?" Mac asked, forehead wrinkling slightly perplexedly; her face, mostly makeup free as always, felt suddenly more naked than she was comfortable with. Her shoulders curved inward defensively.

"You said you didn't know much about fashion and makeup stuff. I could help you if you want." Lizzie said in a way that should have been condescending but came out as plainspoken.

"I'll tell you what… If we get an A on the project then you can play Barbie with me." Mac offered, a hint of smile on her face as her fingers flitted across the keyboard enthusiastically.

"I guess I'll find out if you really want to be helped by our project grade then." Lizzie commented; she figured Mac's eyes staying glued to the screen was her cue to leave,  
"I'll get out of your way, since I don't have much more to offer. Let me know if there's any more trivia you need me to provide or anything."

"Okay…" Mac replied, a sort of softness to her voice.

Lizzie got up and stretched her shapely body, grabbing her purse before heading out of the door. Mac assumed that she had some sort of date to get to, probably with some hot shot bad boy from Pan High.

A week later the project was a success, more than a success it was a phenomena. It seemed like everyone at Neptune High was talking about it. When Mac got to her locker on Tuesday morning, the blonde bombshell was waiting for her, leaning against the wall looking like a pin up photo.

"You owe me a makeover date." Lizzie demanded coyly, pursing her carefully colored lips.

Mac smiled at the ground, "I did say that didn't I?"

"When I'm done with you, no one's even going to recognize you Cindy Mackenzie." Lizzie proclaimed in a movement that was more playboy bunny than image coach. She pointed her finger at Mac announcing, "We are going to the mall for a whole new wardrobe. Friday, after school, meet me here." before waltzing off, espadrille platforms clicking down the hall in time with the sway of her hips.

"It's Mac…" Mac corrected, too quietly for Lizzie to possibly hear. Where was she going to get the kind of cash to go shopping in the style that an 09er like Lizzie would expect? This was why the classes weren't supposed to mix, she told herself.

Mac closed her locker sullenly and was about to head out, when she heard, "Johnny totally won't show me what he got. Do you think he's like hiding something from me… like you know… cheating?" A peroxide blonde in a halter top was asking her slightly chubby friend.

"I don't know Angie, maybe he's like umm a…virgin?" the friend suggested, "And he just doesn't want you to know."

"God… I swear I'd pay like anything to get my hands on those quiz results."

Mac turned around so that the girl couldn't see the smirk on her face as she realized that she could easily make a profit granting the wishes of people like Angie.

People's curiosity was really astonishing, Mac thought to herself as she looked at her bank account balance a few short days later. $20,000, just for sending out the information students had entered to each other. Shopping with Lizzie was not nearly so nerve-racking a thought now that she had the funds to do it with.

So you raised 20 grand to impress a spoiled little slut? Mac asked herself, feeling more than a little shallow, But then again, what's the harm in giving the 09ers an excuse to give their money to you instead of someone else? Nobody forced them to spend hundreds of dollars apiece to get their hands on the purity scores of their friends and enemies.

The fact remained that she'd done it to impress Lizzie; she knew it was probably stupid wanting to hide what her life was like, but the truth is that Mac didn't really have much in the way of friends, and she kind of admired the attractive and confident seeming younger Manning sister.

Wrapped up in her own internal battle, Mac wasn't really paying attention to anything else, and as a result her keys were smirking at her from inside her car, laughing at her through the glass as she sighed in frustration, locked outside.

"Have you ever seen the movie 'Repo Man'?" asked a voice behind her, and Mac turned to find Veronica Mars standing beside her.

Veronica popped the lock open with a casual ease and blonde hair that was somehow sharp where Lizzie's was soft.

Mac stumbled through embarrassment and telling Veronica, "I don't know why I bother locking it in the first place. It barely runs." She regained her cool enough then to add, "Mostly I just keep it around for status."

Veronica was kind enough to pretend she hadn't noticed Mac's discomposure. That was when Mac knew Veronica wanted something from her.

Mac breathed a sigh of relief when Veronica finally walked away. For a moment there she'd been worried that Veronica was going to figure out that Mac was responsible for the test results and that it would end badly. Veronica Mars had a reputation.

She didn't though, Mac assured herself , feeling pretty slick as she headed back towards the school proper to meet up with Lizzie for their shopping excursion. If the school's resident Nancy Drew wasn't going to find her out, she didn't really have anything to be worried about, Mac told herself. Besides, it's not like I'm doing anything illegal.

Lizzie wasn't at the locker though; she wasn't answering her cell phone either, and Mac began to wonder if she'd messed the dates up. When she saw Lizzie in class on Monday she knew it was more than that.

"What the hell is your problem?" Lizzie snapped, slamming down her books on the desk next to Mac.

"My problem? You're the one who stood me up on Friday." Mac said in disbelief.

"You sold false results for my sister's purity test. Because of you, she can' even bear to show her face at school today."

Mac opened her mouth and closed it again.

"Don't even try and tell me that it wasn't you." Lizzie added, her tone sharp as her body looked soft.

Mac returned to her senses, exclaiming, "Lizzie, I had no idea about the fake results. I just used the information the site collected."

"Well my sister is paying for your greediness." Lizzie said coldly.

It hurt Mac too much to say why she'd needed the money. She liked to pretend that the out of style clothing, and the clearly home dyed hair, was a chosen statement and admitting that it was because she didn't have the money to keep up with 09er fashion cut too bitterly. So, she watched Lizzie walk away, let her think the worst instead.


End file.
